She was LEFT 4 DEAD
by em0lici0uschell
Summary: Zoey's story as she fights through an Infected world with 3 other survivors. Rated M for violence and language.
1. Chapter 1

*hi people! I hope you enjoy this fanfic about Zoey ^_~ I just finished playing the Left 4 Dead single player campaign and I had the urge to write about them. Sorry about the super-original title, too XD Anyway, I hope you enjoy 3

Prologue

Zoey's arm hung out of the window, tapping impatiently against the door of her car. The highway was packed today, although she had no idea why. There were no holidays coming up, and it wasn't like today was a very nice day for travel. The clouds overhead were dark and stormy, like there was going to be a— well, storm.

But the traffic was nonetheless bumper-to-bumper, and it didn't look like it would be letting up anytime soon. Zoey reached over and turned on the radio, hoping to distract herself from her frusteration with a little music. Much to her irritation, however, her favorite station was reporting news about some kind of outbreak in New Jersey. Something about a "Green Flu". Zoey snorted and flipped through the stations until she found one that _wasn't_ talking about this new illness— which was no easy feat.

"What's the big deal about this damn Green Flu anyway?"she muttered under her breath. "Just wait— in a week, no one will even remember what it is."

She ended up being right, in a way. In a week, there would be no one except _her_ to remember what the Green Flu was.

Zoey turned down Primrose Boulevard and scanned the houses for number 34. It was the first time she was visiting her mother since her parents' divorce a year and a half ago. It felt strange, but not completely. Her parents had never really gotten along. Her mother Carolyn wanted Zoey to have a good education and a well-paying job to sustain herself, while her father Wade wanted her to be a police officer like himself more then anything in the world. He had often taken her out to shooting ranges so she could get some experience with guns.

"Whether you chose to be a police officer like your old man or not," he had once told her, "I want you to be able to protect yourself. Girls should be strong and unafraid to protect themselves. You don't need a man to save you."

To encourage the thought that girls were just as tough and strong as boys, Wade introduced Zoey to horror films when she was very young. Ever since, she had had a sort of obsession with them, espeically if they had to do with zombies, slasher murderers, or extra terrestrials.

These things had led to Zoey preffering her father over her strict, traditional mother. When Zoey earned a film scholarship to Aldrich, she had been fully prepared to turn it down in order to follow in Wade's footsteps. However, her mother had insisted on Zoey accepting, and so she had reluctantly left for college. Less then two weeks after she started her first term, she got a call from Carolyn, asking how college was. It had gone something like this:

"_Hello, Zoey. How are you? How is Aldrich?" _

_Zoey had glanced guiltily over at the TV, which was paused. She had been in the process of watching a gruesome movie in which all the actors were torn to pieces by a man with a mask and a chainsaw. "Um, fine, Mom. Aldrich is great."  
>"I'm glad to hear it," Carolyn said. She sounded genuine. Zoey felt even more guilty. "Are you enjoying your classes?" <em>

"_Uh..." Zoey didn't like lying to her mom, but what was she supposed to say? That she had gone to the first week and a half of classes, then holed herself up in her dorm room to watch horror movies 24/7? "Yeah. They're, uh, fun." _

"_Who is your favorite professor?" Carolyn seemed suspiciously persistant, but Zoey refused to give in. _

"_Um, I really like Professor...Furlong." Good thing her mom wasn't a horror fan._

"_Zoey, you're lying to me, aren't you?" The sudden accusation took Zoey by total surprise. _

"_I— what— of course I'm not!" _

"_Last chance," warned Carolyn. _

"_I'm not lying!" _

"_Then why is it that one of your professors e-mailed me inquiring about your health?" Carolyn demanded furiously. "According to him, you haven't been attending his classes for a week." _

_"I've been...studying," said Zoey, gnawing anxiously on her lip. How the hell was she supposed to get out of this one? _

_"Studying _what_, exactly?" snarled Carolyn. _

_"Films!" Inspiration came to her like a lightbulb over her head. "I've been watching old movies this whole time. You know, research." _

_"Zoey, I do not approve of this!" said her mother. "I'm spending good money to send you to Aldrich, you know? And here you are, just watching movies!"_

_"Mom, I got here on a _film_ scholarship," said Zoey. She faked exasperation surprisingly well. "I _need_ to watch movies. I'll call you back later, okay? I'm in the middle of studying." _

_And she had hung up the phone, both satisfied and guilty with her performance. _

She pulled into the driveway of 34. It was a pleasant, little house not unlike the one she had grown up in. She noticed her father's old Chevy pick up already parked in the garage and felt an brief twinge of surprise. Then she just groaned. _Of course. She called him here to yell at him about me. _

She exited the car and slammed the door, announcing her arrival. As started towards the front door, she noticed that the it was already wide open. It hung on its hinges, looking like a lion had recently clawed it to pieces. She stopped, confused and anxious. That was when she heard the screams, followed by three rapid gunshots.

Zoey raced into the house. She staggered into the first room she saw— the living room— where she found the most horrifying scene she had ever seen out of a horror movie.

Wade was standing several feet away from Carolyn, who was face-down on the ground, shaking violently, her limbs jerking every few seconds or so like she was having a minor seizure. He held his trusty pistol in both hands, still pointed in Zoey's mother's direction. Between the two of them, still draped across Carolyn's writhing body, was a bloody body whose limbs were twisted in all the wrong directions.

Even as Zoey watched, Wade stumbled across the room and collapsed on his knees beside Carolyn. Shoving the corpse off of his former wife, he gathered her shuddering body up in his arms and held her tightly to him. That was when he noticed Zoey.

"Call an ambulance," he said hoarsely. Zoey's eyes flashed from her mother to her father to the dead body and back again. Then she just swallowed thickly and nodded, running out of the room and searching desperately for a phone. After what seemed like hours, she finally managed to get her hands on her mother's cellphone. With shaking hands, she dialed 9-1-1.

"Hello, what is your emergency?" said a collected voice.

Zoey almost collapsed with relief. "I-I-I'm not sure," she managed. "I'm, I, I was visiting my mom and I heard gunshots, and when I walked in my father was holding a gun and there was a corpse and my mother was-I don't know what- please, just send an ambulance!"

"Please calm down, ma'am," answered the voice on the opposite end. "We're sending help straight away."

"Thank you!" Zoey gasped.

"Now, if you're still in your parent's house, I advise that you—"

Strange noises from the other room interupted the 9-1-1 woman, and Zoey dropped the phone and ran back to the living room. She stood in the doorway, mouth open in shocked horror.

Her mother was no longer her mother. She was mauling Wade, scratching at him with her nails and biting at his flesh with hungry teeth. Zoey inhaled sharply, and Carolyn whirled. Baring her teeth at her daughter, she lunged inhumanly fast towards her, shrieking.

A single gunshot rang through the air. Gore splattered against Zoey's face as Carolyn dropped limply to the floor, a fresh bullet lodged in her head. Wade sat in the same position Zoey had left him in, his gun raised and smoking. Slowly, he lowered his weapon and looked seriously at Zoey.

"Zoey," he said, slowly. "Zoey, baby. I'm so sorry. Come over here, honey. There's...something I need to talk to you about."

Numbly, Zoey made her way towards her father. She felt a brief moment of unease as she stared at the gun in his hand. _He shot that stranger. He just shot Mom. He could shoot me too. Can I trust him? _And then she realized how ridiculous that was. He had been trying to protect Carolyn when he shot that stranger, she was sure of it. And he definitely had saved her just now. Besides, her mother hadn't been herself. She had been attacking Wade himself before she had charged Zoey.

She fell to her knees in front of her father, whose many wounds were staining his simple blue shirt red. "Dad?" she said, in a small voice. "What's...what's going on? What just happened? Dad, please..."

"Zoey," interupted Wade, gently. "There is an outbreak of a new disease known as the Green Flu. You may not have heard of it, but it...corrupts people. Turns them into the undead. Into zombies. I know how ridiculous that sounds, but you saw what happened to your mother. One of those infected by the Green Flu broke its way through the door and bit Carolyn. I couldn't save her. I was too slow. I wasn't expecting...but that's beside the point. Carolyn was bitten, and she became Infected too, and tried to bite me. Zoey, she succeeded. I've been bitten. Soon, I will be infected with the Green Flu as well." His eyes welled with tears. "I don't want that to happen to me, Zo. I don't want to turn into a flesh-eating zombie and kill the people I love. So, Zoey, will you..." The tears overflowed from his eyes. Zoey hadn't realized she was crying until she saw the tears rolling down her father's weathered face. "...will you kill me, before I become an Infected?" He shoved his pistol towards her, and she took it with violently shaking hands.

"I...I..." Zoey was crying too hard to say anything. She forced herself to stand, wrapped her fingers around the gun's handle. She pointed it as best she could at her father's head, even with her trembling. "I love you, Dad."

The following gunshot would echo in her ears for the rest of her life.


	2. Chapter 2

An old newscast flickered on the television screen. It showed a newscaster who used to be famous but was now either dead or infected speaking to the camera about the disease now known as the Green Flu. She wore a shirt that showed off too much cleavage and her face was caked in make-up. Zoey found it funny that despite the collapse of civilization, people were still desperate to make themselves look "good".

_"Attention, citizens of Pennsylvania," _she was saying, her voice cracking due to static, and perhaps even panic. _"It has just been announced by the American Red Cross that the highly contagious disease known as the Green Flu has developed into an epidemic. The virus is thought to cause extreme agression, mutation to the body cells, and loss of higher brain functions. The Red Cross is still researching the virus, but all inhabitants are being urged to evacuate the city and head towards a safe zone." _The screen switched off the newscaster and onto a map of the forementioned "safe zones" where people were being told to evacuate to.

Zoey sighed and got to her feet. She was fully aware that she had overstayed her welcome in this particular safe house. The couple that had taken residence here didn't trust Zoey; perhaps they suspected her of being an evolved sort of zombie who was just waiting to make its move on them. They were certainly paranoid enough, although in these circumstances, Zoey didn't know where the line between paranoia and rational fear ended.

She had just finished packing her bag when the screams started. _"Brendon! Brendon, no! God, no, please no, Brendon don't go!" _The Infected moans briefly grew louder; then there was a harsh _clang_, and they were muffled once more by the doors protecting them. Zoey hesitated, then leaped down the ladder leading up to the loft of the small room.

"Litch! What happened?" The thin, gaunt-faced woman was standing alone in the middle of the room, staring in horror at the iron door which seperated the living from _them_.

"Brendon!" The woman whirled to face Zoey. For a moment, she was certain the woman was going to attack her. Then she just collapsed in a sobbing heap on the floor and gasped out, "H-h-he left! He w-went outs-s-side!"

Apart from having an unfortunate name, Litch Hertz had led an extremely wretched life up to the epidemic of the Green Flu. Her father had abused her; her mother had overdosed on drugs; and when the rest of her family didn't want her, she had been sent off to a poor orphanage which burned down several years after her arrival and attatchement to its inhabitants. By then she was 16, and her uncle took her in and put her to work at his farm. While there, she was harassed both sexually and verbally until she ran away at 17. Then she met Brendon Hertz, who had money and was kind to her, and on her eighteenth birthday the two got married. Only two years later, the Green Flu broke out across America, and Brendon was literally all Litch had left. All this, Zoey had learned the day she had stumbled into the safe room, when Brendon and Litch were both still relieved that they were not the only two people left in Pennsylvania.

Although Brendon had always been nice to Litch, he had never been very fond of Zoey. His cigarettes made the air in the safe room hard to breathe, and his coughing at night made it hard for Zoey to sleep. Once, she was certain he had eyed her hungrily. Not zombie-hungrily, either, which Zoey could have dealt with with one bullet to the brain. That made it even harder for her to go to sleep, because she was scared of what Brendon might do to her while she slept.

It was for the better that he was gone, really. Although there was no way Litch could survive on her own, even in the safety of this room...and she'd had such a miserable life...

Through the tightness in her throat, Zoey managed, "Litch...maybe...you ought to...go after him." She crouched down next to the crying woman and shoved Zoey's shotgun into her shaking hands. "Make sure your husband's...you know...okay. Don't let him become...you know."

Litch looked up at Zoey through a dirty curtain of formerly blonde hair. "D-d-do you think I c-can s-s-save him?" she whispered. "D-do you th-think it's t-t-too late?"

Zoey shook her head. "No," she said. "It's not too late. It's never too late. Trust me. You'll...you'll both be fine. I swear. I know it."

Litch hesitated. Then she nodded slowly. Her hands curled around the shotgun. "If...if I don't come back...tell Brendon...tell him I..."

"You won't be coming back," interupted Zoey firmly. "Neither of you. You and Brendon will keep going. You'll keep fighting. You'll find rescue."

Litch stared into Zoey's eyes, still nodding. She got shakily to her feet, stumbled to the door. "I...I'm s-sorry for... b-b-being suspicious of y-you," she said slowly. "Y-you're really...v-v-very k-kind...I h-hope you m-m-make it, t-too." Litch unlatched the door, letting the beam of metal fall loudly to the floor. Then she pulled open the door and was gone.

Wasting no time, Zoey launched herself across the room and heaved the beam back onto the door, firmly barring the way of any and all zombies pushing up against the door. She felt guilty— of course she felt guilty— but in this world it was survival of the fittest, right? And Zoey was immune. That meant she was supposed to survive. Brendon deserved to die. He was Litch's whole world, but he'd still been eyeing Zoey. And Litch...well, she wouldn't have survived by herself in the old world. She'd kill herself or get shot in the street or something.

Zoey had done what she had to do to survive. The guilt faded to the back of her mind. There was no point in regretting her actions, anyway. If Brendon and Litch _did_ get rescued, great. Maybe then Brendon would realize how much Litch loved him. But if they didn't...well, everyone had to die sometime, right?


End file.
